Blog Triumphalism, Redux.

Apparently the oldest title still in (continuous) circulation has just left off printing entirely, becoming a purely online publication. I don’t read Swedish, so I can’t decipher a word of the thing, although “logga in” is both obvious and, to anglophone ears, funny.

Poor Hans Holm, the paper’s editor for twenty years, thinks it’s “a cultural disaster.” I think it’s fabulous. A readership of a thousand people was huge three hundred years ago; now it’s miniscule by newspaper standards. If the most important effect of print culture was its democratizing potential (answer: yes), then online publication–cheap, self-archiving, and available worldwide–expands the project exponentially.

I think this approach is really cool. Yes, yes, yes the inside/outside framework imposes all sorts of dubious and reductive divisions–but as a tool for getting undergraduates to understand the material and have a language for talking about it, it has everything to recommend it. I’d love to know more.

Do students come to recognize the conceptual inadequacies of it?

How do you handle the student who says “but my personal experience of Christ belongs inside the circle because I can share it with everyone who has been saved”? (It may not come across in cyberspace, but the subtext to that question is “I wonder how *I* would handle that situation?” not “and doesn’t this problem completely undermine your model?”)

I have been surprised by just how eager students are to talk about issues of religious. Even those who don’t have personal agendas to advance seem to perk up and get interested (to a degree I would not have anticipated) when the course material touches on the divine. It has already happened again this semester: after class discussion on an appallingly small chunk of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (given mostly for practice in reading and understanding heroic couplets) several students stayed afterwards to talk specifically about how one can/should read the religious content of C18 poems–it was the first time this semester anyone had lingered to talk about non-logistical course matters.

I’m going to be coming back to your model as I think about how to organize my gen-ed C18 course next semester…